Where The Paranoid And Delusional Network, The Truth Disappears

COLUMN

January 18, 2013|Colin McEnroe, To Wit

The Facebook page in question links out to a thicket of medium-extremist sites.

One is "Breaking Obama" which posted, after Thursday's presidential announcement on guns: "The Dictator Obama and Prime Minister Joe Biden just completed a massacre of The Constitution using children to promote their Agenda to turn America into a Socialist Country run by a Dictatorship … the 2nd Amendment … has been raped by a ruthless thug tyrant and his henchmen and the rest of your rights are in jeopardy now."

The Facebook page also posted on Thursday a placard pointing out that "When Hitler announced the firearms ban … He made the announcement surrounded by children, claiming the welfare of the children as an excuse …" (Hitler's use of a gun ban to secure his rise to power is a popular meme on radical gun rights sites. It never happened, except eventually to Jews and even later to areas he conquered.)

The Facebook page is obsessed with gun rights and with Obama as a figure of pure evil. There's a picture of the president with the words "When the wicked are in authority, sin increases. Proverbs 29:16."

The Facebook page suggests various means of resisting new executive orders on gun control: impeachment, nullification, disobedience. To emphasize the last point, it featured a photo of Mohandas Gandhi and a quote from him about resisting an evil state. No sense of irony about using a paragon of nonviolence, murdered with a gun, to champion gun rights.

The Facebook page has, at least once, hosted a link to part of gangrenous underworld of Newtown "truthers," the bizarre people who claim that the facts of the Newtown massacre don't add up, that it never happened, that — at best — it's a "false flag" or "wag the dog" operation to distract people from the erosion of their rights.

The Facebook page is not maintained in some kudzu-strangled hollow of the Deep South. It belongs to a woman I know, a woman I used to work with. She lives around here. We're "friends" on Facebook. If you had told me our politics were different, I would have believed you. I wouldn't have believed this.

I've been watching, with a sickened version of awe, the rise of paranoid counter-narratives about the school massacre at Newtown. Because of the Internet, they're spreading like wildfire. I could describe some of the sub-plots and ancillary theories to you, but they would turn your stomach. This is the most real story in our lives right now and, to them, wholly fabricated or irredeemably fishy.

How much attention do you give these people? Do you give the story a platform just to drag it out into the sunlight? What if it's just 35,000 wackos? 135,000 wackos? 1.35 million? How many tightly networked wackos do there have to be before there's an obligation to confront the stories they're telling?

In a way this is nothing new. There were some Arizona guys who drove 2,500 miles to a hearing on a bill proposed by a Connecticut senator to tighten laws on the sale of guns through the mail. The Arizonans said it was "a further attempt by a subversive power to make us a part of a one world socialistic government."

It was 1964. The senator was Tom Dodd. The bill was a response to the Kennedy assassination. That's how long this malarkey has been around.

It was cited by historian Richard Hofstadter in his classic essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." Hofstadter said the paranoid strain was not constant but came in "episodic waves" mobilized by "social conflicts that involve ultimate schemes of values and that bring fundamental fears and hatreds, rather than negotiable interests, into political action."

We are in one of those waves right now. It was awakened by 9/11, but it took root in the election of a black president. It is now enjoying such a wild bacterial growth that heartbreaking tragedies like Newtown are instantly twisted around to feed it.

The good news is, we've survived all the other strains since the 18th century. The bad news is some of those people live right down the street, not in East Jesus. Be careful shaking hands with them. They also tend to distrust flu shots.

Colin McEnroe appears from 1 to 2 p.m. weekdays on WNPR-FM (90.5) and blogs at http://courantblogs.com/colin-mcenroe/. He can be reached at Colin@wnpr.org.